I have an Exabyte 8200 tape unit and it doesn't really work well at all with
NetBSD 1.1 or current. When a tape is loaded and comes online, the first
access to the device gives an I/O error (whether I try to read or to
write it); the second access sometimes works, but more often than not
ends up putting the device into some weird state where it gives an I/O
error after writing some amount of data to the tape and then messes up
even worse, so that you have to reboot to even get the drive reset to
a state where it will come online again or let you eject the tape. Other
times (after accessing the device once and getting an I/O error) it will
happily write and read back an entire tape full of data. Has anyone seen
anything like this, or have any ideas of things to try?
eric volpe
public access networks